Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday August 25, 2010 @03:51PM
from the track-away dept.

jnaujok writes "The Ninth Circuit court has declared that attaching a GPS tracker to your car, as it sits in your driveway, or by extension on a public street, and then using it to monitor every one of your movements, is totally legal, and can be performed by the police without needing a warrant. So, if you live in the Western United States, big brother has arrived."

So then, it must also be legal for me to put one of these devices on my wife's car, or on the local squad cars, without their knowledge? Why do different rules apply to government employees than apply to the rest of us?

They put the speed traps in high-revenue spots over and over again. There's a pattern. There are GPS units that list all the known speed traps and warn you as you approach. There's no radar to jam, no lasers to thwart, just the position of known speed traps.

Er, sorry, what I meant to say was that since the police would only enforce the speed limits in areas that are particularly dangerous to speed in, it warns you to slow down as you approach a hazardous area.

Also, the GPS tracker would have to chirp to send out your data. It would probably be of VHF since that's unregulated (148 - 152 MHz is a good one) so all you'd have to do is check for broadcasts of that frequency. GPS refreshes at 1Hz, so that's probably what they would chirp at unless they're using burst downloads.

FYI, the range on GPS / VHF transmissions in urban environmentsis very short. It gets unreliable after a few hundred meters and it completely thwarted by brick.

Funny, the last time the cops pulled my wife over (for not having a seatbelt on as she turned off our home street) and she realized that she didn't have our current insurance card, I tried to come by and offer it to them. They didn't know the law (it makes it quite clear that the driver is NOT required to have the proof of insurance on their person, only to be insured, and that the police are required to make some attempt to verify the insured status if feasible), and told me that I would be arrested if I didn't vacate the scene immediately "for interfering with police business". And that it would be her fault if they shot me on a suburban street at 5:00 on Saturday afternoon. If that's not making up the law as you go, what is? Mind you, I'm 35, flabby, white, and drive a very boring, very new car. Any cop who thinks I'm a threat when I step out of a car with both hands visible and an insurance card in my hand waving hello is in need of a return to the academy.

If this is any example [youtube.com], they are not ignored. Its just more likely you'll be threatened, arrested, and/or have the shit beat out of you for simply asking about a complaint form.

I forget which video its on but they have a lengthy segment of undercover police simply walking into a station and asking if there is a complaint form. They are all seriously harassed and intimidated. The undercover person usually attempts to retreat at this point. And when they fail to identify themselves or reveal the nature of their intended complaint, they frequently get stalked, threatened, and arrested.

Scary shit and hard to believe you're in the US. And according to the video producers, that series of videos constitutes a tiny portion of the video they had at the time. And since those videos have been released, they have said their repository of like videos have exploded.

Lots of people care, but we long ago passed the point on the slippery slope where it will cost you your and your family's life to protest, but have not yet reached the point on the slope where it becomes likely to cost their lives NOT to protest.

Actually I'd think it a great time to sanitize the vehicle incase you were doing something naughty. Then call in the local news media and bomb squad. Nothing like advertising what the police are doing with the publics time and money and making them use up more of it sending out the bomb squad to remove their device.

The Ninth is the most over-ruled circuit in the entire country. Stay tuned.

By quantity, not ratio. It's by far the busiest circuit in the country. Most cases that go to SCOTUS are overturned (which makes sense as the Court would only see the case if there was some issue with the lower court's decision or a need to resolve it with other decisions), the 9th is overruled roughly as much as any other, e.g. in 2007 it was overruled 19/22 times, while the next busiest district was overruled 4/5 times.

So, I wouldn't bet on the results of the inevitable SCOTUS case based solely on the 9th's largely mythical "most overturned" status.

I'd like to bet on the results on the basis that it's fucking obviously a 4th Amendment violation. But if that reasoning worked, they wouldn't have ruled that way to begin with.:P

Do you know how many bombs are defused? By a "controlled explosion". As soon as the bomb squad realise what they are dealing with, what is the likelihood of a "controlled explosion" being used on your car?

It's probably best to just drop it in a river or off a pier or something then. Those things can't be cheap.

(That is, if you can even get it off your car.. it's probably attached with strong magnets. I wouldn't even know what to look for, even if I jacked up my car every day and looked around with a flashlight.)

It would cost about $300 for the tracker. The receiver would be about $1000. I used to work at a place that tracked animals via GPS / VHF collars for wildlife researchers. There were a few cases where the animal would look, shall we say, rather humanoid, but in all of those cases that was a willing animal.

Anyway, that $300 would get you a GPS unit with antenna, a processor board with memory, and a VHF transmitter that sends out the location. They'd be able to read that location on the receiver. The battery would be a Lithium cell and would run for up to a year. It would be potted for weather proofing. If they had reusable batteries, then you'd be able to use the units pretty much indefinitely.

It could also be set up to record your location throughout the day at intervals no finer than 1/second. (Civilian GPS refreshes that fast, and there's no way they could get their hands on milspec.) It could easily save up the data and broadcast it at a set time (like 3am when you're asleep or 4pm when you're at work) and the receiver would get all the locations you've been in the last day. It only takes about 8 bytes to store a GPS location, so an 8Mbit Flash module is enough to store a year's worth of locations. This would all be on a board roughly 1" x 1.5" x 0.5", plus battery and antenna.

Do devices exist that would permit someone to detect if a GPS has been added to a vehicle, items of clothing, luggage, packpack, etc.? Seems as if the police have created a new market here.

I've heard of wives and husbands placing such devices with loggers on each other's cars to try to catch instances of infidelity and in cases where corporations are spying on one another, but clearly serious freedoms, lives and property are at stake if the government or anyone else readily begin to monitor people'

Probably not, and since it's not your property they'd probably get pissed if you sold it. Me, I think I'd just wrap the thing in a coil of heavy copper wire and discharge a hefty capacitor bank through it. Then I'd record the cop retrieving it and post the video on Youtube. Maybe some of officer so-and-so's neighbors might have something to say about it.

Does anyone else find the thought of ordinary cops skulking around after dark, attaching things to private vehicles just because they feel like it, more

Attaching it to a city bus would be better, you could probably just stick it under a seat. Then, if you feel like having fun, call the transit authorities and say you saw a funny looking device on one of their vehicles.

You have some kind of paperwork showing you put some sort of device on my car, I dunno, like a warrant or something? No? Well, then I guess you must have my car confused with someone else's because there was never any sort of device on my car.

You are looking at this wrong, here in the USA the laws do not tell us what we can do, they tell us what we can not do.

So, if it is not considered a violation of the 5th amendment and there is no law saying "You can not attach GPS devices to police cars" or "You can not monitor police" or any variation there of, then it is legal.

While a government can trample that ownership and turn you into a puppet for its control, it can only do so by force (weapons) and in violation of Natural Law and basic instincts. And in some cases those governments will be held accountable for that trampling (Nuremberg and Tokio Trials).

The USA constitution basically says that all your rights are due you simply being a person, and the constitution limits the power of government to prevent it from abusing your rights. The government does NOT give you rights, your are "born" with rights.

I'm not sure what "privileges" you are talking about, but generally the law does not grant privileges, but restricts your actions, eg drinking age, drivers license, or grants entitlements, eg public roads, police, schools, medical care, etc...

You know your government has tanks, missiles, stealth bombers and is on its way to warships with laser cannons right?

And those tanks, missiles, stealth bombers and other weapons are manned by citizens. I used to be one. While we were joking about it a number of us, including me, argued we'd frag [wikipedia.org] someone giving us a bad order. While I'm no longer in the Army my nephew is in the Marines and I could see him doing it.

It's not as easy to get a nation's military to fire on its own citizens as you seem to think. Heck in the Israeli military there are even refuseniks [seruv.org.il] who refuse to take part in the occupation.

Where in the Constitution was the central EU government ever given permission to tracking the People's movements (whether walking, horseback riding, or in a car)? I can not find it. The US Court has made a poor decision, because they ignored Our Rights in amendments 9 and 10. If such a power exist, it has been reserved to the Member States (or the people).

No, they don't! The "police" have no special powers other than exactly what statutes give them under special circumstances (arrest, crime in progress, etc). Since I do not know of any statute granting GPS powers, the only way the police can do this legally is because everyone can.

This is an important distinction between the American & British (&other systems): In the US, the government derives its' powers by delegation from The People. If The People do not have a power, they cannot delegate it. Under the UK (&other) systems, the Sovereign holds all powers which S/He graciously grants to the people,starting with Magna Carta. The Sovereign still holds other power unavailable to individuals.

The "police" have no special powers other than exactly what statutes give them under special circumstances (arrest, crime in progress, etc). Since I do not know of any statute granting GPS powers, the only way the police can do this legally is because everyone can.

This is an important distinction between the American & British (&other systems): In the US, the government derives its' powers by delegation from The People.

The fact that government powers, in theory, derive from popular consent does not

They can legally do it because the court says its legal. What part of the US judicial system don't you understand?

Thanks for all the platitudes, but the history of justice in the US is actually rather different from that you learned in grade school. You might want to brush up on an infamous character in the US southwest, Judge Roy Bean. His was a racket that enriched him at the expense of justice, all the while being perfectly legal. Keep in mind the tooth fairy is not actually real.

No, no, if you're going to put GPS trackers on officials' vehicles, you don't want to just publish the coordinates of everywhere they go. That would very quickly lead to the discovery and removal of said device.

Wait till they go somewhere questionable, then "coincidentally" show up with a camera and publish pics instead. The tracker will survive longer, and the evidence will be much harder to refute.:)

Recall the recent story about a school district where no one was found criminally liable for tapping the cameras of student laptops while they were at home. I think there was something like 50k images taken. You think maybe some of those were of minors partially clothed, or entirely nude? Masturbating? Having sex?

Would anyone but the government get away with wiretapping, video surveillance, and kiddie porn?

There are a lot of self-defense cases that argue against the supposed monopoly on legitimate force. What government possesses is not different from its constituents, which is the ability to use force in response to harms. The difference is that the government can respond with a degree of force to harms which are not physical (such as financial, etc.), but this is because that right has been delegated by a consensus of the governed. No group can ethically exercise a power which any individual therein does no

I agree with you and the dissenting Judge Kozinski (Regan appointee).
Judge Kozinski said that the court was prejudiced against poor people, taking away their rights simply beause they could not afford a garage
He was right, your driveway is your property, people have an expectation of privacy on it.

You could very easily argue that installing gear without your knowledge to your car while in your driveway would be considered vandalism. I'm just uncertain why they can't get a warrant to do it. There seems to be a war on oversight for the last decade and realistically even longer. When it become bad to have to justify your actions? In the case of FISA you don't even have to justify it before you do it.

So, in cities where public nudity is a crime (likely a misdemeanor), do you have a legal right to be stark naked in your driveway?

There are... degrees of privacy/private control. Driveway is your private property in the sense that you have right to decide who can be on it. But if you haven't erected a fence, you have no right to tell people whether they can *look at* your driveway (and things on it).

GPS tracking, aside from all the other complicating factors, is not too different than people (or police) lo

so if i have "no trespassing" "beware of pit-bull" and "trespassers will be shot" signs posted all over my 4-acre property, and a plain-clothes cop comes along to stick one of these things on my car at night, is it my fault if he gets unrecognizably mauled by three pit-bulls and/or shot from my porch?

Why do Republicans equate limited government with civil rights. Arguably the largest civil rights movements in the last century (sufferage, civil rights movement, gay rights, creation vs evolution in schoold, brown vs board of educaiton, etc) have ALL come to fruition from larger government involvement, not less.

The question is not whether Kagan wants bigger government, but whether she puts the needs of law enforcement/government above the individual. Im guessing from her time at harvard that she will lean to the individual.

I'm not sure I follow. Sufferage didn't necessarily mean more or less government. Nor did the civil rights movement. Nor gay rights. Creation vs evolution did not, as there wasn't even a Department of Education until the 70's. Vis-a-vi Brown.

Don't be obtuse. Forbidding private business owners from discriminating based on race, color, religion, or national origin (and enforcing this prohibition) was an expansion of government powers. A valid one, in my view.

Scalia, Thomas and Alito are the ones you want on this kind of a case.

Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, while they are big, at least in words, on narrowly construing the federal Constitution, are quite apt to find outs for pro-law-enforcement authoritarianism even where the federal government is involved (Scalia perhaps somewhat less so than the others), and all of them are even more likely to read broadly the police powers of the States (or, as they would put it, to read narrowly the federal Constitutional limits

More or less yes. You have to have justifiable cause and the details may vary by state but every citizen can make an arrest for a crime or even a planned crime. This is how police officers get their arresting power.

There was a case a few years ago of an immigrant police officer who was found out not to have valid citizenship and that invalidated all of his arrests. He had been brought in illegally as a child and never became naturalized. The interesting twist is that he had been an MP in the US military for

If you can articulate valid reason, you may detain and transport criminals to the police station and/or jail. The problem is you personally take 100% responsibility for doing so and if found in the wrong, you are 100% liable for wrongful arrest, kidnapping, unlawful detainment, etc.

In an emergency or witnessing a felony in progress (again, can articulate valid reason/concern), you can enter the property of someone else w/o a warrant.

If someone is in the middle of a felony, you may taze them in most states.

I think people care, but people are also aware that the only ruling that matters will be SCOTUS. Currently, this is a hot issue in various courts and they all rule differently. SCOTUS will make the call that defines this issue.

But it's a different kind of awful to have friends and neighbors who just can't be bothered to stick up for the civil rights of their fellow citizens.

The problem is, that's not how they see it -- you're not asking them to stick up for the civil rights of their fellow citizens, you're asking them to stick up for the civil rights of criminals. In today's culture, suspicion == guilt.

Even in the comments to this article, at least one person echoed the common sentiment, "I don't do anything illegal so I have nothing to worry about."

People seem oblivious to the fact that, if these sorts of encroachments are tolerated, authorities will only seek more and more power--until something you do every day actually is illegal, and we'll have the monitoring infrastructure to back it up and enforce it.

Everyone is automatically assumed guilty. This is a direct violation of the principles of America.

The law is engineered to get you... no matter WHAT the truth is. Prosecution want you in jail, no matter what. They do not care if you're innocent. They just want to win, and be right in their own mind.... despite truth.

Just look at how we argue politics today. We just scream points at each other. No one listens. Each side is out to win, and they dont want to hear truth. They want to WIN. THAT is how the law works...

They want a win.... not justice, truth, or to uphold the constitution.

I can walk through the parking lot at the police station and attach GPS transmitters to all the squad cars and publish that information to the internet because they have no expectation of privacy, right?

I can understand why this decision turned out the way it did. Placing a tracking device on your vehicle is about the same as following you around with an unmarked vehicle. It's much harder to detect of course and so you might think you are unobserved when that's not true.

Anyways I can see this possibly creating a small market for GPS jamming devices. The legality of such devices of course would be questionable if not outright illegal.

I can understand why this decision turned out the way it did. Placing a tracking device on your vehicle is about the same as following you around with an unmarked vehicle.

The primary difference being that it can be conducted en masse - i.e. its possible to track thousands of vehicles without committing any significant manpower. I have a similar problem with ANPR [wikimedia.org] - one unattended machine can do what would otherwise take thousands of officers to do.

The cliched response to both of these examples is "you have no expectation of privacy in public" - but that is a legal principle formulated in a simpler time before automation (especially automation on the back-end) was even conceivable. I think a principle more suited to the current situation (which will only become more extreme as the automation on the back-end becomes more and more capable) is that if surveillance requires resources not normally available to the average citizen then it requires a warrant. I think a principle along those lines more closely matches how the average joe sees the world, which is pretty much the definition of "reasonable."

As the purpose of a warrant is to maintain oversight to prevent abuse, it makes even more sense because more power always equals more temptation for abuse so being able to do something that a normal person can't reasonably do is practically by definition more opportunity for abuse.

The article actually covers the facts fairly well, but it would be much better if the writer didn't label every quote "conservative" or "liberal" with a seemingly naive understanding of the meaning of those terms. For example, when one judge points out that not enough poor people become judges, so they are underrepresented, he is labeled a "raging liberal." This comes from the oversimplified stereotype that liberals love the poor and conservatives hate them. I would expect this from radio or TV pundits, but not from Time magazine.

You can use deadly force to protect people and property from imminent danger. Someone poking a hand under your bumper is not that.

And there's generally going to be no way you'll prove self-defense against a cop, since you have to presume a cop is assaulting you legally unless you know specifically otherwise. you might have a chance if he's assaulting you without telling you he's a cop, but that won't work if he's under cover, since "I didn't know he was a cop" is the whole point of that. And killing a cop isn't just murder or manslaughter, it's a cop-killing, and for that you get special treatment.

No. You could not easily argue it is. You could easily imagine the words that you would say before the judge told you to shut up and let your lawyer enter your guilty plea, but that's not easily arguing it.

Fear of a bomb requires seeing something that looks like a bomb. Seeing something small and indistinct is not that, and not seeing what's in his hand is especially not that.

You'd be closer if you saw his body armor and said it looked like a bomb-belt. Though that probably works better in Baghdad.

Okay, so, as a citizen of California, I have a question for the Slashdot techies out there. These GPS trackers that can be tacked onto my vehicle. How large are they? What do they resemble? Do they give off any transmission signal/EM radiation of some sort. I am personally appalled by this particular ruling, but if that's how things are going to be, then let the arms race begin. I want to know what, exactly, these GPS trackers do. Do they transmit your location data back to the GPS sat system? Or do they transmit to some kind of local receiver? Do we know that frequency they transmit on?

If the police and government are going to take active duty to track all citizens, without the burden of providing a reasonable level of suspect, then I say we, as citizens fight back for our rights. If the local police want to track our vehicles, what kind of devices can we hack together to detect these nasty little tracker chips? There has to be some way to build a receiver similar to whatever the police use to detect the GPS data, attach it to a small wand or golf club or something, and wave it around our car every time we get in it to make sure the trackers are not installed. So, GPS nerds out there, how's about we start putting together a How-To to homebrew a GPS tracker detector? Then, if we find a tracker attached to our vehicle, we can simply pull it off and duct tape it to the local stray cat.

The trend is towards cellular phone style devices; GSM or CDMA radios with GPS unit. No keypad or screen required so they can be quite small. Battery life is an issue, however they go to sleep of they aren't moving so they only need to work for the duration of a trip.

is it ours? What's the law regarding when someone abandons their possessions on your property?

If I found one of these on my vehicle, then I can take possession of it? Didn't someone recently get into the press for finding such a device and ebaying it? iirc the police or whoever contacted ebay and got the auction taken down. I didn't see what happened after that.

If I find such a device on my car, I will either:
1. Smash it into little tiny bits.
2. Attach it to another car at random.
3. Call the bomb squad an tell them that there is something suspicious on my car that I did not put there.
4. Ignore it.
5. Ebay, baby! Track that mother fuckers!

From the look of it, they didn't declare that it's explicitly allowed by law, they only declared that it's not prohibited by law under the fourth amendment. IANAL, but that sounds like we're in a much better situation in terms of fighting this than we could be.

This is why most small GPS and cell phone jammers come with cigarette lighter plugins, so they can live in your car. If you want to take a private trip (and not have access to your own GPS or cell phone of course) you may want to invest in one of these (easier than crawling under your car and inspecting it every time you want to go do something. Or so I read in a magazine. http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.portable%20jammer [dealextreme.com].

you have to believe they'll fully cover themselves, here. its probably not just the right to attach but also the right you have to inspect your car and remove unauthorized items from it!

this is fraught with problems. how am I to know that this is a cop-box (as I call it) and not some terr-a-wrist(tm) box? any box that I did not put on my car is a 'trouble box' and should be removed. I have no idea what the heck its doing. could even be a bomb! why would I even be expected to tolerate such a thing?

what if my car has some wireless gear on it (say something that goes from trunk to hood and I didn't want to run cables so I did a wireless link) and suppose their transmitter interferes with my units operation? that's willful interference! suppose it fucked with a safety or security system I installed?

only an idiot would allow such a law!

yes, yes, I know. I fully know who buys and pays for our laws these days.

What irony? I've long feared my own government far more than any foreign government or terrorist organization, and I'm just an average American and don't even wear a tin-foil hat. And please be sure and notice that after the Bush administration rushed to take away more of my rights with the Patriot Act the Obama administration has done nothing to remove those restrictions. So it makes no difference which party is actually in office...meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

This is the WORST possible argument one can give regarding the erosion of our rights.

It is never acceptable to give away our rights...regardless of whether we ever perceive we may need them. SHould I take away your right to free speech, because you don't speak about controversial topics? How about taking away your right to the free pratice of your religion? How about taking away your right to be secure in person & property...the government doesn't want my stuff, why should I care if they take away Joe's house?

For the love of god people...this shit is important to everyone. I can't believe anyone would say "Who cares?" when it comes to our rights & freedoms.

I don't think it will be illegal to detect or remove them or to destroy them.

There have been cases in the past where rights of ownership and possession become issues. So, if you happen to have a radio transmitter detector, or some other sort of detection device to determine that you have been bugged, you are pretty much free to remove it, sell it on ebay, whatever you like. SMART criminals (I know, there are way few of those) will know to check for them... but will probably also keep their vehicles secure.

People really don't know what is going on here and more significantly, don't WANT to know. Too often we use words like "conspiracy theory" to mean "obsessive and/or paranoid nutbag." And every time we hear something scary like this about our government, most people simply don't want to believe it and label anyone who speaks of it as a "conspiracy theorist." The psychology is the same for anyone who speaks for the truth about the holocaust. (The very fact that I said the word already has more than 50% of the people here ready to mod me down. I don't care, you are only showing who and what you really are by making presumptions without hearing what anyone has to say.)

We have "blank check laws" being passed without the people voting for them knowing what they really are. We have unconstitutional money seizure laws. We have secret rules and laws just for the DHL. (I know that's a fact because there was and still is a lot that TSA screeners cannot say or advise the public about... and I was actually a screener for a while) We have erosions and in some cases complete disregard for the constitution that was designed SPECIFICALLY to protect the people from "government." A constitution only works when the government follows it.

What if I have a lot of property? Or I go onto private land? They can't follow you there without a warrant. But this fun little device can go where ever you can. Now that they are allowed to bug your car to collect one type of data, when are they going to add more functionality? Say, sound recording, miniature camera? And hey, since its legal to attach some things to your car now, can I stick on whatever I please now too? Hey, you love my political party now, enjoy my sticker. Wait, I don't like the

It's not a problem, in the same way that it's not a problem to have cameras recording everything that goes on within the sight of a public street at all times, easy to search in a database. How is it different than having a cop walking around the city taking notes?

The difference is price and magnitude. The cost of tailing someone, and the risks of detection, prevent a police department from doing so indiscriminately. When you make it cheap and easy, you increase the use of that practice by orders of magnitu